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NASA spacecraft could plumb depths of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

The centuries-old storm has been shrinking and growing pale lately, and no one is sure why. NASA's Juno spacecraft can help solve the mystery

YOU think we have bad storms on Earth? Jupiter’s iconic hurricane-like storm, the Great Red Spot, has been raging for at least 250 years, and if new work is correct, soon we might know why.

Marzia Parisi at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and her colleagues have estimated the storm’s speed and the rate its winds are slowing. The team says NASA’s Juno spacecraft arriving at Jupiter in July might be able to verify the calculations.

The storm is slowly shrinking and turning lighter. Understanding why is tricky, because no one knows how far through Jupiter’s atmosphere it penetrates. The spot behaves somewhat like major cyclones on Earth, which suggests it is limited to a few atmospheric layers. But if that were the case, the titanic winds surrounding the spot would have sheared it apart long ago, says Parisi.

Yet relatively stable winds in Jupiter’s swirling bands of gas can hold storms in place for a long time, even within a fairly narrow band.

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The gravity-sensing instruments on NASA’s Juno could plumb the Great Red Spot’s depth, as long as it extends more than 2000 kilometres below the cloud level, says the team (Icarus, doi.org/bcg3).

Solving this puzzle could help us understand the planet’s interior structure, dynamics and evolution as well as the Great Red Spot itself, says the team.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Staring into the heart of Jupiter’s raging red eye”